Living to Tell the Tale (37 page)

In my time
as a student, you could still read a newspaper in that spot that perhaps had few predecessors in the world. It was a blackboard, like the ones used in schools, displayed on the balcony of
El Espectador
at twelve and at five in the afternoon, with the latest news written in chalk. At those hours the passage of streetcars became difficult, if not impossible, for they were obstructed by the waiting,
impatient crowds. Those street readers also had the opportunity to deliver a unanimous ovation when they thought the news was good and jeer or throw stones at the blackboard when they did not. It was a form of instantaneous democratic participation that gave
El Espectador
a thermometer more efficient than any other for taking the temperature of public opinion.

Television did not yet exist, and
there were radio newscasts that were very complete but aired at fixed times, and so before you went to have lunch or dinner, you stood and waited for the blackboard to appear so you could go home with a more complete version of the world. That was where the solo flight of Captain Concha Venegas between Lima and Bogotá was announced and followed with exemplary and unforgettable rigor. When the news
was like that, the blackboard was changed several times outside its scheduled hours in order to feed special bulletins to a voracious public. None of the street readers of that unique newspaper knew that the inventor and faithful follower of the idea was named José Salgar, a twenty-year-old novice reporter at
El Espectador
who became one of the great journalists without having gone beyond primary
school.

Bogotá’s distinctive institution were the cafés in the center of the city, where sooner or later the life of the entire country would converge. In its time, each one enjoyed a specialty—political, literary, financial—so that a large part of Colombia’s history during those years had some connection to the cafés. Each person had his favorite as an infallible sign of his identity.

Writers
and politicians in the first half of the century—including an occasional president of the Republic—had studied in the cafés along Calle Catorce, across from the Colegio del Rosario. The Windsor, which made history with its famous politicians, was one of the longest lasting and a refuge for the
great caricaturist Ricardo Rendón, who did his major work there, and years later used a revolver to put
a bullet through his inspired head in the back room of the Gran Vía.

In contrast to my many afternoons of tedium was the accidental discovery of a music room open to the public at the Biblioteca Nacional. I made it my favorite refuge for reading in the shelter of great composers whose works we requested in writing from a charming clerk. Those of us who were habitual visitors discovered all kinds
of affinities with one another according to the type of music we preferred. In this way I became acquainted with most of my favorite authors through other people’s tastes, which were abundant and varied, and I despised Chopin for many years because of an implacable melomaniac who requested him without mercy almost every day.

One afternoon I found the room deserted because the sound system was
out of order, but the woman in charge of the room permitted me to sit and read in the silence. At first I felt that I was in a peaceful oasis, but after almost two hours I had not been able to concentrate because of flashes of uneasiness that interfered with my reading and made me feel uncomfortable in my own skin. It took me several days to realize that the remedy for my uneasiness was not the silence
in the room but the ambience of music, which from then on became an almost secret and permanent passion for me.

On Sunday afternoons, when the music room was closed, my most fruitful diversion was riding on the streetcars with blue windows that for five centavos traveled without stopping from La Plaza de Bolívar to Avenida Chile, and where I spent those adolescent afternoons that seemed to trail
behind them an endless train of many other lost Sundays. The only thing I did during that journey in vicious circles was to read books of poetry, perhaps a city block for each block of verses, until the first lights were turned on in the perpetual rain. Then I made the rounds of the taciturn cafés in the old neighborhoods in search of someone who would have the charity to talk to me about the
poems I had just read. At times I found him—it was always a man—and we would stay until after midnight in some dismal hole, finishing the butts of the cigarettes that we ourselves had
smoked and talking about poetry while in the rest of the world all of humanity was making love.

At that time everyone was young, but we were always meeting others who were younger than we. The generations shoved
one another, above all the poets and the criminals, and no sooner had you done something than someone else appeared who threatened to do it better. At times I find among old papers a few of the photos taken of us by street photographers in the atrium of the Church of San Francisco, and I cannot repress a roar of compassion, because they do not seem like pictures of us but of our children, in a city
of closed doors where nothing was easy, least of all surviving Sunday afternoons without love. That was where I happened to make the acquaintance of my uncle, José María Valdeblánquez, when I thought I saw my grandfather making his way with his umbrella through the Sunday crowd coming out of Mass. His attire could not in any way disguise his identity: a three-piece suit of black wool, a white shirt
with a celluloid collar, a tie with diagonal stripes, a vest with a watch chain, a bowler hat, gold-rimmed glasses. The impression was so strong that I blocked his way without realizing it. He raised his menacing umbrella and held it a hand span away from my eyes:

“Can I pass?”

“Pardon me,” I said in embarrassment. “I mistook you for my grandfather.”

He continued scrutinizing me with his astronomer’s
gaze and asked with a roguish irony:

“And can one know who this famous grandfather is?”

Confused by my own insolence, I said his complete name. Then he lowered the umbrella and smiled with very good humor.

“Well, there’s a reason we look alike,” he said. “I’m his oldest son.”

Daily life was more bearable at the Universidad Nacional. But I cannot find the reality of that time in my memory because
I do not think I was a law student even for a single day, though my grades for the first year—the only one I completed in Bogotá—might lead one to believe the opposite. There was no time or
opportunity to establish the kind of personal relationships we had at the
liceo,
and my fellow students scattered throughout the city when classes were over. My most pleasant surprise was finding that the general
secretary of the faculty of law was the writer Pedro Gómez Valderrama, whom I knew about because of his early contributions to literary pages, and who was one of my great friends until his premature death.

My most assiduous fellow student beginning with the first year was Gonzalo Mallarino Botero, the only one accustomed to believing in certain wonders in life that were true even though they
were not factual. It was he who showed me that the faculty of law was not as sterile as I thought, because after the first day he took me out of the class on statistics and demography, at seven in the morning, and challenged me to a personal poetic duel in the café on the university campus. In the wasted hours of the morning he would recite from memory the poems of the Spanish classics, and I responded
with poems by the young Colombians who had opened fire on the rhetorical remnants of the previous century.

One Sunday he invited me to his house, where he lived with his mother and sisters and brothers in an atmosphere of fraternal tensions like those in my father’s household. Víctor, the oldest, was already dedicated to the theater and recognized in the Spanish-speaking world for his recitations.
I had escaped the tutelage of my parents but had not felt at home again until I met Pepa Botero, the mother of the Mallarinos, an untamed Antioquian woman in the hermetic heart of the Bogotán aristocracy. With her natural intelligence and prodigious talk she had a peerless faculty for knowing the precise spot where curse words recover their Cervantine ancestry. They were unforgettable afternoons,
watching dusk fall on the boundless emerald of the savanna, in the hospitable warmth of perfumed chocolate and warm crullers. What I learned from Pepa Botero, with her untrammeled slang and the manner in which she said the things of ordinary life, was invaluable to me for a new rhetoric of real life.

Other kindred fellow students were Guillermo López Guerra and Álvaro Vidales Barón, who had been
my accomplices at the
liceo
in Zipaquirá. But at the university I was closer to Luis Villar Borda and Camilo Torres Restrepo, who struggled, with bare hands and for love of the art, to put out the literary supplement of
La Razón,
an almost secret paper published by the poet and journalist Juan Lozano y Lozano. On the days the paper went to press I would go with them to the newsroom and give them
a hand in last-minute emergencies. Sometimes I was there at the same time as the publisher, whose sonnets I admired, and even more so his biographical sketches of national figures, which he published in the magazine
Sábado.
He recalled with a certain vagueness Ulises’s note about me but had not read any of my stories, and I evaded the subject because I was sure he would not like them. Beginning
on the first day, he would say as he left that the pages of his newspaper were open to me, but I took this only as Bogotán correctness.

In the Café Asturias, Torres Restrepo and Villar Borda, my fellow students, introduced me to Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, who at the age of sixteen had published a series of lyrical prose pieces, the fashionable genre imposed on the country by Eduardo Carranza from
the literary pages of
El Tiempo.
He had tanned skin and straight, deep-black hair, which accentuated his Indian appearance. In spite of his age he had succeeded in acquiring a reputation for his articles in the weekly magazine
Sábado,
founded by his father, Plinio Mendoza Neira, a former minister of war and a great born journalist who may not have written a complete line in his whole life. But
he taught many others to write their own at newspapers that he established with great fanfare and then abandoned for high political posts or in order to found other enormous and catastrophic enterprises. I did not see his son more than two or three times during that period, and always with fellow students of mine. I was surprised that at his age he talked like an old man, but it never would have
occurred to me to think that years later we would share so many days of reckless journalism, for the lure of journalism as an occupation had not yet occurred to me, and as a science it interested me even less than the law.

In reality I never had thought it would ever interest me until one day when Elvira Mendoza, Plinio’s sister, held an emergency
interview with the Argentine dramatic performer
Berta Singerman, which altogether transformed my prejudices against the profession and revealed a vocation I did not know I had. More than a traditional interview of questions and answers—about which I had so many misgivings, and still do—it was one of the most original ever published in Colombia. Years later, when Elvira Mendoza was a renowned international journalist and one of my good friends,
she told me it had been a desperate measure to salvage a disaster.

The arrival of Berta Singerman had been the news event of the day. Elvira—who edited the women’s section in
Sábado
—asked for authorization to interview her, which she received with some hesitation on her father’s part because of her lack of experience in the genre. The editorial offices at
Sábado
were a meeting place for the best-known
intellectuals in those years, and Elvira asked them for some questions to use in the interview, but she was on the verge of panic when she had to face the scorn with which Singerman received her in the presidential suite of the Hotel Granada.

From the beginning, Singerman took pleasure in rejecting the questions as foolish or imbecilic, not suspecting that behind each one was a good writer, one
of the many she knew and admired from her various visits to Colombia. Elvira, who always had a lively temperament, was obliged to swallow her tears and endure the rebuff. The unexpected entrance of Berta Singerman’s husband saved the interview, for he managed the situation with exquisite tact and a good sense of humor just when it was about to turn into a serious incident.

Elvira did not write
the dialogue she had foreseen, based on the diva’s responses, but instead wrote an article about her difficulties with Berta Singerman. She took advantage of the providential intervention of the husband and turned him into the real protagonist of the meeting. Singerman went into one of her historic rages when she read the interview. But
Sábado
was already the most popular weekly magazine, and
its circulation sped upward to a hundred thousand copies in a city of six hundred thousand inhabitants.

The sangfroid and ingenuity with which Elvira Mendoza
used Berta Singerman’s foolishness to reveal her true personality set me to thinking for the first time about the possibilities of journalism, not as a primary source of information but as much more: a literary genre. Before many years passed
I would prove this in my own flesh, until I came to believe, as I believe today more than ever, that the novel and journalism are children of the same mother.

Until then I had risked only poetry: satiric verses in the magazine of the Colegio San José and lyrical prose or sonnets of imaginary love in the manner of Stone and Sky in the single issue of the paper at the Liceo Nacional. A short while
before, Cecilia González, my accomplice from Zipaquirá, had persuaded the poet and essayist Daniel Arango to publish a little ballad I had written, using a pseudonym and seven-point type, in the most obscure corner of
El Tiempo
’s Sunday supplement. Its publication did not move me or make me feel like more of a poet than I already was. On the other hand, Elvira’s article made me aware of the reporter
I carried sleeping in my heart, and I resolved to wake him. I began to read newspapers in a different way. Camilo Torres and Luis Villar Borda, who agreed with me, repeated Don Juan Lozano’s offer of his pages in
La Razón,
but I dared submit only a couple of technical poems that I never considered mine. They suggested I speak to Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza about
Sábado,
but my tutelary shyness warned
me that I still had far to go before I could risk a new occupation about which I had no more than a dim understanding. Yet my discovery had an immediate usefulness, because at the time I was entangled in the unhappy awareness that everything I wrote in prose or in verse, and even my assignments at the
liceo,
were shameless imitations of Stone and Sky, and I proposed a thorough change beginning
with my next story. In the end experience convinced me that adverbs of means that end in -
mente
^*
are a bankrupt habit. I began to correct them whenever I ran across them, and each time I became more convinced that this obsession was obliging me to find richer and more expressive forms. For a long time there have not been any
in my books except for an occasional quotation. I do not know, of course,
if my translators have detected and also acquired, for occupational reasons, this stylistic paranoia.